This Kind Of Skin Cancer Is More Deadly For Pregnant Women

Melanoma during pregnancy is more dangerous than melanoma that develops in non-pregnant women.

Pregnant women with the skin cancer melanoma may be more likely to die from it than women with melanoma who are not pregnant, according to a new study.

Researchers found that women in the study who were diagnosed with melanoma during pregnancy or within one year of giving birth were more than five times more likely to die from the skin cancer than women with melanoma who were not pregnant.

Moreover, the women with melanoma who were pregnant at the time or were recently pregnant were nearly seven times more likely to experience metastasis — the spreading of the cancer to other parts of the body — than women with melanoma who were not pregnant. They were also more than nine times more likely to have a recurrence of their cancer over the next 7.5 years.

“When we looked at our data, we were shocked” to see the significantly higher rates of death, metastasis and recurrence of the cancer among pregnant women, said study author Dr. Brian Gastman, a plastic surgeon at Cleveland Clinic.

In the new study, the researchers looked at 462 women with melanoma who were younger than 50. Among them, there were 41 women who had been diagnosed with melanoma while they were pregnant or within one year of the time they gave birth. In this group, 20 percent of the women died from melanoma, compared with about 10 percent of the women who were not pregnant around the time when they were diagnosed with melanoma.

Moreover, in 25 percent of the women diagnosed with melanoma during pregnancy or soon after giving birth, the cancer spread to other parts of the body, compared with 12.7 percent of the women who were not pregnant.

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